Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ 0:00
Monuments disrupt our everyday engagement, so we've, for the most part, move through the world kind of habitually, not really thinking about a whole lot, necessarily. We walk down the streets with, you know, that we go every day without really paying any attention, and a monument is meant to kind of disrupt that a little bit. Hello, and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Janet Donahoe, the Amrita Emerita Professor of Philosophy at University of West Georgia, and we're talking about her book, Remembering Places: A Phenomenological Study of the relationship between memory and place. Dr. Donahoe, wonderful to have you on today.
Janet Donohoe 0:46
Thank you so much for having me, PJ. I'm really glad to be here.
PJ 0:50
So, Dr. Donahoe, why this book?
PJ 0:54
Well, I wrote this book a long time ago, it feels like, but at the time I was working through some Hannah Arendt and things that she has to say about the built world and the way in which monuments and memorials contribute to our world, and at about the same time there were some other things going on, there were monuments being torn down in Eastern Europe, there was the 911 memorial going up, and I was just really struck by those two things happening, the removal of monuments, and then what I considered to be a rush to put up monuments to the 911 tragedies, and so I was thinking about why do we do that, what, what do we erect monuments for, and what is our connection to them, and particularly why does that connection then change, and so I really wanted to grapple with the way in which they are places kind of outside of time to some degree, but also places where we bring a lot of our own memory and tradition, and they are places unique in the transference of memory and tradition. So it was just a lot of stuff was sort of coming together, and I really wanted to work through it, so that was kind of the impetus for the book, and it took me into lots of different directions.
PJ 2:32
Yeah, I'm familiar with that. This whole podcast jumps around to different directions as I'm listening to, maybe we should save that free end, but immediately, what are what are some of the answers that you came to based out of those practical considerations you started with. So, when you talk about the removal of monuments, what what answers did you find as you started writing this book
PJ 3:00
in terms of why we put them up and why we take them down, is that what you're asking about?
PJ 3:06
Yeah,
PJ 3:07
well, I mean, it's complicated, of course.
PJ 3:11
Yeah, yeah.
PJ 3:13
And what I came to is that monuments actually serve as a kind of palimpsest, and a palimpsest is a medieval parchment that shows that there's a lot of erasure and a lot of writing over, and so you can see sort of layers of thinking on a palimpsest, so to speak, right, and so what ends up happening, I think, is that in their attempt to create something permanent, they end up being a palimpsest in the sense that we can continue to write over them, and so the tearing of them down doesn't remove the place of a monument, so to speak. What it does is rewrite it. It writes over it in a certain kind of way, but there's always that sense that there's something under the surface that's still sort of making itself apparent to us, and that's how then I think memory works. That's how I think tradition gets passed along, and how in some ways it should get passed along, so you know, a lot of the erection of monuments is to try to solidify something literally in stone, and to say this is what we believe, or this is what we think, or these are our heroes, and all that's really doing is begging for us to take it up as critique or through critique, and if we're not doing that, if what we're doing is just sort of, you know, saying, "Oh, these are our heroes, without any kind of critical examination, we're failing in our approach to monuments, that in fact what they're calling on. To do is to not simply reiterate tradition, but to take up tradition through the present in a kind of critical and thoughtful way, so not only do monument, does the word in fact mean to remember, but it also means to be mindful and so monuments have that kind of double thing of calling us to remember, but also calling us to be mindful, to be attentive, to take things on in that kind through that kind of lens of critique.
PJ 5:37
Yes. Thank you. As I look at this, and forgive me if I have a little excuses here, I just want to make sure I'm tracking. I had a guest on to talk about the afterlives of data, and specifically, what are the rights for people who have passed on? Who owns the data? And legally, right now, it's the giant tech corpse, which has seen, I think it's core. Wow, talk about a talk about a Freudian slip, and one of the things that I think it was.. oh man, I can't remember.. I remember the first.. the first name was Carl, but one of the things that he mentioned was that it's so easy to erase, and that's a lot of times what they would do is to erase the digital, and when we feel like the digital stays, but actually it's once you erase it, it's just gone, whereas if you look at, for instance, the rediscovery of Koine Greek, of what we think of sometimes as Biblical Greek, but it was the Greek of the common person, the reason that we rediscovered that, because they didn't know how it existed, was a garbage dump that had survived for millennia, right. And so this idea of traces and solidity, even when you remove the monuments, there are still - you can't completely remove it, there's still traces. Is that am I tracking with that.
PJ 7:02
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and even things that we think of as being completely gone. I'm trying to come up with an example. District Six, for instance, in South Africa, in Cape Town, I talk about that a little bit, that they just bulldozed the entire place, but then there was such a roar that they were unable to do anything else with it, and so it just stays as a kind of empty, or it may have changed. This was 20 years ago when this was the case, so it may be, you know, different now, but there are still always going to be, as you say, those traces and those things that we can, I mean, literally we can dig in the in the earth and we can find some of that stuff right through archeology, but there are other ways in which that comes to the fore as well,
PJ 7:53
and then so as we look at this one of the your main points, main main threads that you kind of draw on is hustrals life world and alien world. Can you talk a little bit about the experience of home and how that shows up? It's interesting that you focus on monuments. It seems like that applies to architecture everywhere,
PJ 8:16
right? Yeah, it does. So, yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of the literature about home is a romanticized vision of what the home is, and our desire to get back to some sort of childhood safety, or you know, something like that, and what I do with Hustrell is to use that notion that he has of home world and alien world to talk about the home as a normative foundation, and by normative I don't mean good, I just mean a kind of baseline, so the childhood home is the, or the first home that we encounter is what kind of sets the standard for us for every other place that we encounter, and so any other place that we encounter is more or less alien, depending upon how it's like our home world, and so there are, you know, a gazillion examples we can come up with of this, but a very easy one that I use is in the United States. We're used to seeing automobiles on the roads, and we look left before we cross the street, and then we look right, and then we can cross the street if there's no traffic, right? But if you're someplace else that's not the United States, that can be a radically different proposal. So, if you're in Britain, you're not going to look. If you look left, you're going to get hit by a car. If you look right first, and then you look left, and then you can cross the street, then you're going to be a little bit safer, right? But if you're in someplace else, even you know in India, in Delhi, you're not going to see just automobiles, you're going to see all kind. Of different modes of transportation that you have to be attentive to in order to avoid getting run over or hit or hurt or whatever, and so there are ways in which our tradition of, you know, organization of our streets in the United States becomes home world and becomes simply the habitual way in which we move through the world, and so any place else becomes an alien world, in the sense that we have to adjust to it, we have to be thoughtful about it, we have to pay attention in ways that we don't necessarily pay attention here. So what I do with that is that the home, then, as that foundation for us, ends up essentially writing itself on our bodies, so our bodies become habituated to certain ways of being in the world that have to do with our own home world, and that home world we can think of as being, you know, it's, it's smaller or larger, depending on what it is, what we're talking about. So, having grown up in the Midwest, I grew up in, you know, a decent-sized city in the Midwest, where everybody had manicured lawns, because that's what you did, and when I moved to the South, you can't have a manicured lawn here very easily without spending a whole lot of money on a lawn surface, because things grow like crazy here, and so it just felt very off to me when I first arrived here. Everything was so verdant and it felt overgrown, and so there's a way in which this world was somewhat alien to my own midwestern upbringing, and those are just kind of mundane examples, but that is something that writes itself on the body, even the air here in the South of the United States feels different on my body than the air in the Midwest,
PJ 12:04
and forgive me for the digression, but my wife grew up in Alabama. I was born in Connecticut, and so we live in Central Florida now. We came down and parked the car, and we're just sitting in the car, and she's like, this is so nice, and then she looked over at me, and I was just dripping sweat, and she's like, it's just different for you. I'm like, it is, it's just, it just is what it is. I'm grateful we're here, that, but the fascinating thing to me, one, I've always, whenever we talk about beauty and buildings, I constantly find myself drawn to that New England kind of craftsman style, right? I say, like, you know what looked really good as this. I was like, wait, nobody builds that in Florida, and there's, there's reasons for that, right? But the other thing is, I went to visit family in Connecticut, and I walked into a house, and there was a smell of old wood that I had, like a Proustian moment, where I was like, like, just this huge surge of memories from my childhood, where I was like, oh, I forgot about this smell, whereas now, and I, you walk out, and I don't know what it's like in Georgia. In Florida, I think you have this in Georgia, there's a certain smell in the morning once the vegetation just starts baking, where you like come out and there's that like just this green smell, this I don't know how to explain it, and it's it's tied to the humidity and it's tied to just everything growing and too much water sitting, and it's so hard to explain, but I think anyone who lives down here immediately I'm like, ah, Florida morning, right? If you blindfolded me, covered my ears, and you're like, Where are you instantly? No, by that smell,
PJ 13:44
right?
PJ 13:44
So, I'm just like, that's those are similar examples,
PJ 13:49
yeah, yeah. And you know, the the comparison to Proust is great, because what that does, you know what Proust is pointing at is the role of memory and all of that.
PJ 13:58
Yeah,
PJ 13:58
and so we have that memory, and it can be triggered by all kinds of things, but it's always going to be a sort of bodily response that's about that that baseline that then gets disrupted by something else that either calls us to that memory or something that becomes overwritten, you know, I can sort of become used to this. It's never going to become my normative baseline, but it can sort of, in some ways, replace the memories that I have that are, but those memories are always going to be triggered still, and they may be read differently now because of my alien world, which has caused me to reflect upon those things. If I hadn't ever encountered Georgia, I wouldn't think about the ways in which the Nebraska air feels on my skin. I wouldn't think about the ways. Which my childhood home has conditioned me, so to speak, to encounter other places in the world
PJ 15:10
as a maybe trying to translate this a little bit. I think most people's experience of writing now is digital, and you erase and you write with ease the palimpsest. Maybe a more modern day example would be pencil and paper, and the erasing, and because the model, and this is, you know, just that common thing, like the models we have of technology tend to influence how we think about things, and so we start to not understand architecture because we don't understand the solidity of it in a way that if you're used to erasing things, is that, is that a fair modern day equivalent?
PJ 15:49
Yeah, or even writing in the margins of a book, which you know, if you're reading that bothers me
PJ 15:56
so much. I'm sorry, it's okay, that's okay, that's a good example. Please continue.
PJ 16:00
Yeah, I mean, if you're reading an electronic, it's just a totally different kind of thing, and it doesn't, it doesn't carry that, that same sort of material manifestation as well.
PJ 16:14
My dad, my mom and dad live with us, and so we share our library, and my dad highlights all his books, and I all right. That's just a personal thing. I need to move on, like dog earring, highlighting. I'm like, no, if I want to read it, I want to read it again, clean. Like, oh, anyways, all right. Oh,
PJ 16:33
you're kidding. You don't want to read what you thought about it the first time you read it. I mean, that's what I find. I mean, that's the sort of layering that I find so important.
PJ 16:44
Yeah, yeah. No, I, I get that. I understand that it's just not how my brain works. So, that's.. yeah. Anyways, that's.. that feels like a different interview. That's.. that's interesting, though. I haven't, like, thought deeply about that, but I probably should, so kind of, as we look at this, so we talked about the life world and the alien world, how does that, and then I think you mentioned Merleau-Ponty, and kind of the individual and the body, and that might be where you talk about Baccalaureate as well, if I'm so.. when you, when you talk about the individual, we've kind of.. we've kind of talked about that a little bit. How does that move towards the collective, and what is the role that monuments play in making that collective?
PJ 17:38
Yeah, so if you think about what I was saying a little bit ago about the role that monuments play in sort of transferring communal notions of hero or of tragedy or whatever, what they are doing then is writing on the world, and there's this conception that what they're doing is writing on the world in a permanent kind of way, when in fact what I'm trying to do is is suggest that that's not in fact what's happening, and that when we, so they, they participate in the creation of our home world, such that when we encounter them, we take on those traditions, right, and we take on those traditions in a kind of bodily way, in the sense that when we encounter a monument, you know, monuments are things we can walk up to and walk around and engage with in a bodily kind of way, and they can have then either a kind of ideological role where they sort of tell us what to think, so to speak, or they can have a more what I consider to be a more kind of open role, and so to give an example, and this might be a little bit controversial, I don't know, we'll see the World War Two memorial, I don't know if you've been to see it in Washington, DC, it's one of the more recent ones, but I would consider it to be overbearing and sort of ideological, and it wants us to think of the great generation and of the power of the United States and our role in World War Two as the ones who brought victory, and so on and so forth. It's not very thoughtful about that. It's very overbearing in its size, in its concrete, there is a reflecting pool there, but there's a big sign that tells children not to get into the water, and so you know if, and my sort of take on that is, if this is supposed to be celebrating those who preserved our freedom, what is freedom other than children being. Able to play in the water, you know, there's this, but we're supposed to have this kind of distance, this kind of reverence of it, and Benjamin might talk about that as a kind of aura. It has this aura, and that aura is is something that prevents us from thinking deeply about it, as opposed to something like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which is an invitation to us to think about it. It is an open space, and it essentially draws into question what that war was about, and it reflects us, in fact, back to ourselves when we approach that monument, and you can see how people are so moved by that monument. It's something that asks something of us, as opposed to telling us what to think, and so if we think about how those sort of frame a world for us. Those are two very different approaches to framing our world, and one of those is open and asks us to think and be critical or critique, and the other not so much. I don't know if that gets at what you were asking. 100%
PJ 21:19
no, it's a beautiful answer. If I can, I want to see if I'm following you, because critique isn't exactly freedom, but we can't have freedom, and we can't have a living tradition without critique. That critique precedes the generative impulse, is that kind of
PJ 21:41
yes,
PJ 21:42
and so if I'm hearing you correctly about the World War Two memorial, what comes to mind for me is that it's insisting on that period and that generation, it's insisting on its status as an exemplar rather than encouraging it to take root from reflection, is that which would match with the overbearing
PJ 22:08
yes
PJ 22:09
terminology. Am I tracking with you there?
PJ 22:11
Yeah, yeah, and it's materially overbearing. It's meant to make you feel small, I which
PJ 22:23
this goes back to kind of the Aristotelian critique, which is you should always look at separate the critique of what's the thing's purpose and how well does it do it. In this case, your problem isn't with how it does it, because it does it well. The problem is with the purpose, am I understanding?
PJ 22:42
Yeah, well, I mean, what, what it conceives of as its purpose, right? What I would say is the purpose of monuments more generally.
PJ 22:52
Yes, yes, the they had a specific thing in mind that they wanted to accomplish, which you have a problem with, but they accomplished their purpose very, very well, like you're like literally like architecture should work in those ways, right? When it, when you're talking about execution, when you're talking about purpose, it should not. Yeah,
PJ 23:12
yeah.
PJ 23:15
So now, but what's interesting, and I think this kind of goes to your kind of main point here, kind of you're working up to what ties it is the dynamism, and so as you, you look at this, how does I know you've kind of referenced this already, how does the dynasize dynamism play out in tradition, and so what's kind of your goal? I feel like we've been talking about the how, what's your goal for tradition? What do you think tradition is supposed to do?
PJ 23:44
Well, and this is where the critique part plays a big role, and so I draw on Husserl, who is very concerned about what he calls renewal and critique, and so our relationship to tradition is meant to be one where we take tradition and multiple traditions up, but at the same time we are critical, we are critiquing those traditions. We don't blindly take them up. To blindly take them up is just to perpetuate all kinds of things without thought, and so what Husserl suggests that we ought to be engaged in, which is what he thinks philosophy is all about, is encountering these things and taking up those traditions through a lens of critique, asking ourselves, is this what I want to transfer to the next generation, is this what I want the world to look like, and so you know, if you take up that tradition and decide that maybe that isn't the world that we want, maybe that isn't what we want the world to look like, then by all means tear down. On the monument, or at least change the narrative of the monument, so there are all kinds of, you know, there's a whole range of things that you could do in response, right, and so if you decide that the monument is no longer really serving whatever we think it ought to serve, then there are all kinds of possibilities for changing what it is that the monument is doing, and that's either, you know, you can tear it down or you can put up a plaque that explains why this was erected in the way that it was, and when it was, and maybe now we think about it a little bit differently, or you can do something much more creative than that, you know, put funny hats on things, or whatever, you know, there are there all kinds of ways in which we can respond to monuments, which is not just saying this is our world and it's unchanging, this is something that we will always adhere to one
PJ 26:04
of the things I'm hearing as we talk about dynamism is what we talk about having a monument or not having a monument, which ignores the whole role of traces and the fact that it always just kind of persists, and so there's kind of this toggle, and it's very, I think, modernist, and it does grow with the digital age. I think people think like this, that you either have the monument or you don't, right? It's either on or it's off. And what you're talking about is a more organic and growth-oriented approach. Is that.. am I tracking with you there?
PJ 26:40
Yes. Yes. So really, what becomes, I think, most important is how does it make us think about our world? Because monuments disrupt our everyday engagement, so we, for the most part, move through the world kind of habitually, not really thinking about a whole lot, necessarily. We walk down the streets with, you know, that we go every day without really paying any attention, and a monument is meant to kind of disrupt that a little bit and get us to take a little side course and think about things, but if they cease to do that, if they cease to sort of implore us to think about things, then we need to do something in order to kind of reinvigorate that process, because I think that's really what what it comes down to is, are these things that we still value and why.
PJ 27:37
So, as an example, there's a church downtown, and they did a really lifelike statue of a homeless man sleeping on a bench covered in a robe, and as you walk closer, you realize that his feet are pierced, right, and so now that's interesting, and I think it's a little different from even the Vietnam and World War Two memorial, and I'd love your kind of thoughts on that, but that, that's that's disruptive, right? Because Orlando does have, I mean, especially being warmer, it has.. I hate it's not a homeless problem. We have a homeless population that tends to be bigger with our size because it's warmer here,
PJ 28:20
right?
PJ 28:21
Is that. that is, that a good example of the disruptive, like that. Oh, I'm used to not seeing this person also. Oh, that's that's supposed to be Jesus, right? Which is
PJ 28:31
right, yeah. Because we do, as a community, have a kind of response, and this is meant to make us think about that response. Sure, do. So,
PJ 28:43
and now that what's interesting, because you talked about disrupting our everyday routine, but one of the things that I was thinking about, especially Washington DC, is the difference between the everyday disruption in the monuments that we walk by and the monuments that call us to visit often by place, right? Like, I could be wrong, but I think we talked about Viet, the Vietnam Memorial, and you talk about the World War Two memorial. Those are more places that you visit. It's not like you walk by it by chance,
PJ 29:14
right?
PJ 29:14
What? What's.. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between those two kinds of monuments,
PJ 29:22
interesting. Well, I think if you think about the mall in Washington, DC, of course, those are very deliberate and meant to be very powerful monuments, which is what makes the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, they're so subversive in some kind of way,
PJ 29:47
so the Vietnam Memorial is in the mall.
PJ 29:50
Yeah.
PJ 29:51
Oh, I didn't know that. Okay, I haven't been. So, this is
PJ 29:56
Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin is on the mall. Of and when it was initially erected, it was quite subversive, and people were some people were pretty outraged by it, and you know, there's there was some controversy about it, so they ultimately added some, because it's just a big black granite wall with the names of those who died, I've seen
PJ 30:17
pictures, but that doesn't give you the context, which, of course, is, you know, kind of important.
PJ 30:24
So part of the controversy then was that it was not valorizing the soldiers enough, and so then they added this, these statues of soldiers, and included, well, I mean, that was meant to sort of make everybody feel a little better about it, but in fact sort of detracts, I think, from the power of the monument itself. But if you think about why do we even have the mall, right? The mall is supposed to be a place of pride for Americans, where we can, you know, celebrate the founding of our country, and we can celebrate the great heroes of our country, and so there's a kind of deliberate nest to those monuments, but we also see the ways in which then that gets itself kind of disrupted, so the Lincoln Memorial becomes quite a space for other kinds of subversive acts, so you know, if you think about the civil rights movement, you think about Martin Luther King Jr's speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and those become that way precisely because of the intention behind the building of the mall, does that? I'm not sure that answered. Yeah,
PJ 31:50
well, it's part.. I mean, it was a.. it's a hazard of being a big questions podcast, so I.. I
Speaker 1 31:57
asked, I asked
PJ 31:58
a big question off the cuff, and it's a beautiful answer. If I could follow up, so then when we talk about ones that call more to visit, almost like a pilgrimage type identity, and I part of this is the example I gave isn't that it's subversive every day, subversive, right? When we talk about those, how does that shape us differently when it's when it's something that we are, we are called to go visit versus like you couldn't get to it just walking by on a normal everyday occurrence,
PJ 32:30
right? Well, I think there's something similar going on with both of them, in the sense that we have a tendency to just kind of let it wash over us, and so, even though we're called to see it, and we go, and we see it, it's prime, it's to some degree, so that we can take the picture and say I was there, and we, you know, we recognize that this is supposed to be what it is, which is to celebrate our country, and so on and so forth, and it, it doesn't ask us in the same kind of way to be engaged in critique, and so what I'm pushing is to try to get us to recognize that we should be engaged in critique, and the same is true of those that we pass every day in our mundane walk to work, or you know, commute to work, or whatever. We don't pay that much attention, and we don't think about, okay, so what? Why was that put there, and what really am I supposed to be thinking about it? And we don't think about that, all the decisions that were made in the placing of the monument in the first place, you know. So, I mean, you do, but
PJ 33:41
most people don't, yeah,
PJ 33:44
and so you know when you, when you go to the mall and you get the hero worship that goes on there, you think, okay, yeah, you know, we did some great things in World War Two, we did some great things in Korea, rah rah America, without realizing, as the Vietnam Memorial calls us to do, these are individual young men who were sent to their deaths for the sake of our country, and is that appropriate? Well, let's think about what the death of an individual for the sake of the country is really about, and we don't very often do that, not in any kind of critique. We do it, and we, and we say, thank you for your service, and absolutely, but there's also the other part of that, which is that this is about the death of an individual, and the Vietnam Memorial does a great job of saying these are people with families and lives. Who are no longer with
PJ 35:03
us, that immediately when you, because we were talking about the relationship between the individual and the collective, as you talked about. Thank you for your service, which, of course, is an appropriate response. We don't say thank you for your service to the mothers, right, who have just lost a son.
PJ 35:20
Yes,
PJ 35:21
and that's a wound, and that's a pain. We haven't - we don't say thank you for your service to young children who have lost a father, right? And so there's, yeah, which is not - does not feel as heroic, and does not feel as rah rah as saying, thank you for your service to someone who had, who had individually made that sacrifice there and over there.
PJ 35:47
Right,
PJ 35:49
so I hate this because I wrote this down. I really want to ask this question, but this is such a poignant moment, and I was like, I have this philosophically abstract question now, and I don't want to lose like that was really, thank you, and that that adds a real human element that I think is very important, that I don't want to lose, that's why I don't think of myself as a philosophy podcast, because there's an interdisciplinary, but there's also I never want to lose that kind of human element, and that's very, it's very powerful, and I think that's part of the reason why you are pushing for more of a Vietnam War Memorial approach. The idea to reflect, it's like, is this a cost we, we're, we still want to do, right?
PJ 36:36
Right.
PJ 36:36
And also, what is it like? What do I owe? You know, what was my ethical obligation, because if you're just like, I'm supposed to be like that with, like, the World War Two memorial, or I should, man, how great was it that they did this versus like, oh, this is what it cost, it's like there's a different demand on you, right? It's easier to cheer than to mourn,
PJ 36:58
right? Right, and it's easier to want to celebrate heroes than to think about our own mortality.
PJ 37:11
Yes, yeah. Well, well, that's a. I'm hoping to have a guest on soon to talk about the emotions and of old age, and she's
PJ 37:27
done
PJ 37:27
very well with, with several, several of her books, but that book didn't. She's like, I'm really disappointed, and I don't think she said annoyed, but I could tell it's just like everyone's like, they don't want to talk about the emotions of old age, and it's like this is just a natural human, and like powerfully human, not just natural, but like powerfully human thing, but not, not a, not in a late stage capitalist culture, it's hard to sell to reflective people who are reflective in the, in their later years, so I feel like we've sat with that for a second. One of the things that I'm hearing, and I'm wondering, how much of how much you see this in your work is Hegel's idea of sublation, the of the the artifact transforming over time, Gothamer's example is always been like the the painting where you have like a nobles like make me look awesome, and the artist paints it, and then he puts a little practical joke in there to make fun of him that the noble wouldn't get, and then it becomes a war, a wartime like prize, because it's, you know, it's valuable, and then it comes back, and it gets put in a museum. It's the same painting, but it acquires different meaning over time.
PJ 38:51
Yes,
PJ 38:52
and it doesn't lose its previous meaning, it just keeps, you know, I mean, I think this ties directly, and this is why I'm asking about the diet, you know, with dynamism, it seems like there's some immediate parallels with sublation. We talk about, for instance, and I notice, you know, when you wrote this, I don't know, I feel like the Confederate statues came later,
PJ 39:13
right?
PJ 39:14
Right, I'm not trying to get you in trouble, but it seems really, you know, the way that those were first erected, and why they were, and what those meant to even people agreed and disagreed with them has changed as the culture has changed, and so it seems to me immediately applicable to monuments, like so, with sublation, something that you was part of your thought process here? Do you see it as there anything fruitful that comes to mind when, when I bring that up?
PJ 39:52
I mean, more through Gothamer, honestly, than Hegel, not being a huge Hegel fan, myself. Off, so God mercy. I
PJ 40:03
enjoy reading God of her more for choir there. Yeah,
PJ 40:07
absolutely. Yeah, so I mean, yes, and the, that is inherent in anything really that's part of our world, but monuments in particular, yeah, because we think there's some kind of intention behind them, we approach them with an eye or an ear to understand that intention, while we have a tendency to try to ignore all that we bring to that and all that we bring to that, which is what makes the dynamism what it is, because you know it's still this, the same monument, but it's viewed very, very differently now, and so that is the dynamism, because what happens in that, that confrontation between any person or group of people and the monument is that the meaning of it is transpiring in the in between, so it's not that we make the meaning of the monument, nor does the, is the meaning inherent to the monument. The meaning takes place in that confrontation, or in that encounter. I don't mean confrontation in any kind of like negative violent kind of way, but in that encounter with the monument, and that's the dynamism, then it's always something that's going to be evolving because we come to it differently, and its surrounding world is somewhat different, and so it's never going to be something where a meaning is set in stone, and so often we think of it as a meaning set in stone, but that's just not how monuments ultimately are.
PJ 41:51
Its passage through time does not go unmarked,
Speaker 2 41:54
right?
PJ 41:54
Not right, both physically and as much as you know, a lot of times they'll try that, but also culturally, and so, and to go back to an earlier question, I wanted to ask you, we talked about kind of the growth dynamic versus kind of the toggle on, toggle off, you know, excuse, I don't have a technical name for that, but it, well, you talked about perpetuating, and the thing about perpetuating instead of critiquing is that if you do perpetuate, even if you want to keep what you have, which is generally not the case, normally there's at least something you want to drop, but if you just perpetuate, it automatically corrupts because of the passage of time, it's not, it's not where it came from, it's still ongoing, is that
PJ 42:42
yes, yeah, because it is embedded in a world as much as it is at the same time creating that world, and that is always in flux,
PJ 42:54
yeah,
PJ 42:54
so it
PJ 42:55
rocks, right, like it literally, like you can't have the greatest generation again, because the circumstances that created them, so to try and go back, it doesn't, that doesn't work. We can only become who we are meant to be forward, is that?
PJ 43:13
Well, yeah, but also, I mean, the greatest generation, do we still think that's the greatest generation? I mean, that is constantly changing. So, yes, there's this,
PJ 43:28
there's the perpetuate side, and then there's even if you wanted to perpetuate, it would still corrupt.
PJ 43:34
Yes,
PJ 43:34
yeah. Sorry, continue.
PJ 43:36
Yeah, no, and that's that's part of the critique of wanting to erect memorials to the 911 tragedy, so immediately you know what I saw the desire there to be one of solidifying our role as victims of this horrible atrocity without any attempt to really think it through, process, figure out why it happened, what its impact was going to be long term. We just wanted to say we own the story. Here's what we think about it, and that is always going to be a failing attempt. And if we had perhaps allowed some time, we might have thought about that a little differently,
PJ 44:21
and I, that I agree with everything you just said, and there's also I think it's just tangential, but rushing the grieving process is a dangerous thing too. So this has been fascinating. Thank you, but I want to be respectful of your time. For someone who's been listening for the last 45 minutes, what is something - excuse me - besides buying and reading your excellent book, which everyone should do, besides buying and reading Remembering Places, a phenomenological study of the relationship. It between memory and place, I want you to know, I had to practice phenomenological. I've always stumbled over that, and I'm very proud I've said it right the last three times. So, besides buying and reading your book, what would you recommend to someone who's listened for the last 45 minutes to either meditate on or due in response over the next week,
PJ 45:23
I mean, I guess it would be two-pronged. I am sort of calling people to be attentive to the built world and also to critique that built world, to think about whether or not it really is the world we want to be living in, in a very kind of concrete, no pun intended, there material way, because that built world has so much to do with the way we think about who we are and our role here and what our relationship is to the community, and it says a lot about us as human beings, and so we need to be attentive to it.
PJ 46:12
Beautiful answer. One thing that also shows up, because I think this is the temptation when people first enter, it's like, well, then we should just destroy it, and it's like, no, that leaves traces too. And so, having that, like, when you're talking about critique, you're talking about having the inventiveness, the generative impulse moving forward set to a better world, whatever we're constructing,
PJ 46:40
right,
PJ 46:42
beautiful. beautiful Dr. Donahoe. Been an absolute joy talking to you today. Thank you,
PJ 46:47
thank you, PJ. This has been great.
Unknown Speaker 46:49
Thank
Transcribed by https://otter.ai